Thomas Benton Cooley was an American pediatrician.
Background
Thomas Benton Cooley was born on June 23, 1871 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. He was the youngest of the four sons and two daughters of Thomas McIntyre Cooley and Mary Elizabeth (Horton) Cooley, and a younger brother of the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley. His father served as a justice of the supreme court of Michigan, first dean of the law school of the University of Michigan, and as the first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Education
Cooley graduated from both the literary department and the medical school of the University of Michigan, receiving an Bachelor of Arts degree in 1891 and an Doctor of Medicine degree in 1895.
In 1940 he received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Michigan.
Career
After an internship at the Boston City Hospital (1895 - 97), he returned to the University of Michigan in 1897 as instructor in hygiene and physiological chemistry at the medical school. Although pediatrics had not then become a recognized branch of medicine, Cooley developed a strong interest in the diseases of children and in 1901 went to Germany for a year's study, after which he spent an eighteen months' residency at the Boston City Hospital working with contagious diseases. In 1903 he returned to Michigan as assistant professor of hygiene at the medical school, but left after two years to open a private practice in pediatrics in Detroit, which thereafter remained his home.
In Detroit, Cooley took an active part in the campaign to reduce the high death rate among infants suffering from diarrheal diseases, served as medical director of the Babies' Milk Fund, and helped establish medical inspections in the local schools.
During World War I, Cooley served as a major with the American Red Cross in France (1918 - 19).
Back in Detroit, he was appointed chief of the pediatric service and chairman of the staff of the Children's Hospital of Michigan in 1921 and, in 1936, professor of pediatrics at Wayne University College of Medicine.
His lack of interest in administrative problems, however, as well as conflicts generated by his rather austere personality, prevented the establishment of the pediatric research center under the joint auspices of the hospital and the medical school which he had envisioned. Cooley's own interests lay less in the individual patient than in the etiology of the disease. He centered his research in hematology and the anemias of childhood. Though he made a number of contributions to pediatric literature, the most important was his identification of the familial anemia that bears his name--Cooley's anemia, also known as thalassemia or Mediterranean anemia, because it was at first thought to occur only in families of Mediterranean stock. The disease, whose victims rarely survive childhood, was first described by Cooley in 1925. He suspected its hereditary nature and was delighted when later work by others demonstrated its genetic origin and mode of inheritance.
He was similarly interested in sickle-cell anemia, a heritable disorder at first supposed to occur only in children of African descent, and was the first to find and report it in a child of white ancestry. He strongly urged the importance of genetics in medical education as a means toward identifying hereditary factors in other diseases. Although concerned with improving the pediatric training offered by the medical schools and the teaching hospitals, he stressed the importance of a liberal education in the humanities, warning that without it physicians would eventually become merely a group of technicians.
He spent his summers at his cottage in Sorrento, Maine. He became seriously ill in the summer of 1945 and died that fall of hypertensive heart disease in the Eastern Maine General Hospital in Bangor, at the age of seventy-four.
Achievements
Personality
He was a highly private, self-contained man.
Quotes from others about the person
"Cooley was that unusual phenomenon, a pure intellectual strayed into medicine. " (Wolf W. Zuelzer)
Interests
He took great pleasure in music and painting.
Sport & Clubs
He enjoyed golf and boating.
Connections
On December 21, 1903, Cooley married Abigail Hubbard of Ashtabula, Ohio. Their two children were Emily Holland and Thomas McIntyre.